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January 01, 2001
π = 3.0
There is a frequently cited urban legend that the Indiana legislature once tried to set the value of π to exactly three. While this is not precisely accurate it is nearer the truth than any smart hard working Hoosier would care to believe.
Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin, M.D., a physician in the community of Solitude, Posey County, Indiana, was one of a long line of mathematical hobbyists to try to square the circle. He believed he had succeeded despite the existence of a proof that it is mathmatically impossible to square the circle. Dr. Goodwin wrote a bill incorporating his new ideas which exempted the state of Indiana from paying royalties on his "new mathematical truth". He then persuaded his State Representative to introduce it.
Indiana House Bill No. 246 was introduced to the on January 18th, 1897. The representatives did not see any problem with a bill which might save the state royalty payments in the future, and it passed unanimously in the Indiana House. When the bill came before the senate Professor Clarence Abiathar Waldo, head of the Purdue University Mathematics Department, happened to be in the senate and overheard the debate concerning the bill. He was horrified and took it upon himself to coach several senators in basic mathematics and geometry. After being educated the senators postponed the bill indefinitely.
Because the bill never passed the senate it never became Indiana law, but it easily could have without the intervention of Professor Waldo.
The bill does not actually specify that π should be equal to three, however due to the large number of strange claims that the bill makes it inadvertently implies not one, but four different values for π ~9.24, ~3.236, ~3.232, and 3.2. It is fairly clear that the last value (3.2) is the value of π that Dr. Goodwin intended.
The story of the Indiana Pi Bill is related in greater detail here.
Posted by nolandda at January 1, 2001 12:00 AM